The Project Gutenberg Etext of Moby Dick, by - Plano Library ...

Moby Dick or The Whale
the jet is fairly spouted into your eyes, it will blind you. The wisest thing the investigator
can do then, it seems to me, is to let this deadly spout alone.
Still, we can hypothesize, even if we cannot prove and establish. My hypothesis is this:
that the spout is nothing but mist. And besides other reasons, to this conclusion I am
impelled, by considerations touching the great inherent dignity and sublimity of the
Sperm Whale; I account him no common, shallow being, inasmuch as it is an undisputed
fact that he is never found on soundings, or near shores; all other whales sometimes
are. He is both ponderous and profound. And I am convinced that from the
heads of all ponderous profound beings, such as Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante,
and so on, there always goes up a certain semi-visible steam, while in the act of thinking
deep thoughts. While composing a little treatise on Eternity, I had the curiosity to place
a mirror before me; and ere long saw reflected there, a curious involved worming and
undulation in the atmosphere over my head. The invariable moisture of my hair, while
plunged in deep thought, after six cups of hot tea in my thin shingled attic, of an August
noon; this seems an additional argument for the above supposition.
And how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty, misty monster, to behold him solemnly
sailing through a calm tropical sea; his vast, mild head overhung by a canopy of
vapour, engendered by his incommunicable contemplations, and that vapour--as you
will sometimes see it--glorified by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon
his thoughts. For, d’ye see, rainbows do not visit the clear air; they only irradiate vapour.
And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions
now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray. And for this I thank
God; for all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few along with them, have
intuitions. Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this
combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them
both with equal eye.
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